Computing devices have proliferated in numbers and types over the recent years becoming a part of daily life for many people. Different computing devices, such as laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's), smart phones, and the like, have displays and graphics controllers with varying capabilities.
Displays are composed of a rectangular array of pixels (picture elements). The more pixels, the more detail may be shown in a given amount of space. This is termed the resolution. In order to work together, operating systems, graphics cards, and monitors support a number of standard video modes. As hardware has improved, and users have become more demanding, video modes have tended towards higher resolutions and greater color depth. As a result, a larger amount of memory is dedicated to display operations on a computer motherboard and/or on the graphics card.
On the other hand, physical and economical restraints tend to encourage software developers to provide applications with distinct levels of capabilities for different computing devices. For example, the full version of MICROSOFT WORD® (Registered Trademark of Microsoft Corp.) includes a large number of user edit capabilities that may be completely exploited in a computing device with an advanced graphics controller and display. Versions of the same application such as WORD MOBILE® (Registered Trademark of Microsoft Corp.) are also available for computing devices with limited display and graphics capabilities enabling the user to use the word processing application without all functions.